My Mom and the Metric System

My Mom, Anita Anderman (née Jenkins). Circa I have no idea. The 1940s?

My Mom died two days ago on September 15. She was 89 years old and was born in 1926.

It happened relatively quickly. About three weeks ago she went in and out of hospice pretty fast. Then, she went into the Intensive Care Unit a little over a week ago with pneumonia and sepsis. After some additional problems surfaced, the decision was made to take her off oxygen on Thursday and she apparently died 10 minutes later. My younger sister was with her though she had ceased recognizing any of her children some time ago.

I tell you this because, if it wasn’t for her, I would not have taken on anything so ridiculous as trying to get my country to realize our error in not adopting the metric system.

My mother taught me to leave things better than I found them. It’s for that reason that I couldn’t shake the obligation–once I’d realized what a problem we had created for ourselves–to tackle metric system adoption. It wasn’t just that, of course, it was also that I believed I had the skill set in the form of communication and film backgrounds that might enable my success. Once those things came together, I knew what I needed to do and four years later, here I am, still plugging away.

The house in Detroit where I lived from five years old as it looks today. My mother lived there until I was in college.

She also showed me that it’s possible to master anything if you put your mind to it. It wasn’t my father who remodeled the basement, it was she. She also built our back patio, tiled the bathroom, designed and maintained our gardens (the hosta plants seen in the photo were hers) and even learned to reupholster our furniture.

My mother is also the reason I use my middle initial. All three girls in the family were given “Anita” as our middle name–after her first name. It’s as a tribute to her that I have always used “A” as a middle initial. Let’s face it, “Anderman” is uncommon enough of a last name that I didn’t need anything additional to distinguish it but I have always used the letter “A” out of respect for her.

The other thing I got from her was the notion that the only limitations I might have would be the ones I placed on myself. In her 20s she got her pilot’s license and wanted to fly airplanes. (To hear my late grandmother tell it, it was an early fascination of hers.) At that  time, women were not allowed to become commercial pilots so she settled for the next best thing: she became a stewardess. At least that way she could be around planes, even if she wasn’t flying them herself. Not only was it odd for a woman to want to fly planes at the time, it was also unusual for a woman to travel all over the country by herself, even if it was for work. Typically, back then, a woman was under her father’s care until such time as she got married and then was under the care of her husband. (That attitude has changed, thank goodness.) Her own father had deserted her family when she was young so maybe that freed her from those constraints. I’ll never know.

I wish I’d learned more about our family’s history prior to her memory decay so, dear readers, I urge you to take time to learn about your background while you still can. Once I began my genealogy research it was too late for her to recall her background.

Still, I’ll always remember her as a good, supportive mother. If you care about the work on this project, and many of you do, I ask that you give her some credit for it. She’s the reason I undertook it in the first place.

Thanks,

Linda